Saul and Patsy

by Charles Baxter (Pantheon; $24)

It is rare that a novel, even a good one, manages to evoke contemporary life without being self-conscious about it. But that is what Baxter achieves here in his portrait of a recently married couple—neurotic, cantankerous Saul Bernstein, who has taken a job teaching high school in rural Michigan, and his wife, Patsy, who does her best to steady him. Saul rages at one point, “If you put a Vermeer on television, it stopped being a Vermeer and turned into something else on television.” Baxter’s painterly technique reverses this process: moments that in other hands would be merely sensational (one of Saul’s remedial students shoots himself on Saul’s lawn) here assume their rightful place in the continuum of a young couple’s experience and inexperience.♦

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The agent’s dismissal gives the appearance that the agency buckled under political pressure, and sets a highly disturbing precedent.

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